Cloud Road (4 page)

As the road slipped over a col and began to carve hairpins down into the valley, I had my first real sight of the Avenue of the Volcanoes. I took off my boots and gorged on a soft ripe mango and woody bananas, and savoured the view. A broad valley ran away, almost perfectly straight, to the south. It was fertile and well
cultivated, rich greens filled the valley floor, the sides rose paler and the pattern of small fields on the huge hills was like a fine mesh net cast over the landscape. To my left, the main mountain mass commanded the col. A pall of cloud obscured the summits. Grey skirts of torrential rain were swirling through the half-light beneath. A glimmer of lightning flickered inside it. The scale was so large it was difficult to guess distances. I saw I was going to have to develop an attitude to cope with walking all day in a huge landscape: it might feel like walking on a treadmill. A path left the modern highway and plunged straight down the hill; it would save me over a mile and take me away from the traffic. As I started to descend it, my excitement grew. The even, half-trimmed stones surfacing it, and neatly engineered drains on either side, told me I had found the
Camino Real
. At the other end of it was Cuzco, in far-off southern Peru. My stride lengthened.

The crops around me added subtlety to the texture and colour of the land. Maize, the ancient subsistence crop, and still a rival to cereals and other grain crops, changes delicately as it grows. The young shoots are vivid green against the earth, like young wheat. The eight-foot-high mature plants have purple sheaths round the corncobs, and their tall stems give a coarse weave to the fields, like a soft tweed. Groups of eucalyptus grace the knolls and line the streams; the slender young trees feathery and delicate, the maturing trees like green candyflosses.

I saw the cloud on the mountain start to roll downhill towards me, and speeded my step. In half an hour, I was picking my way down a narrow path across the face of a low cliff, back down onto the Panamerican. In light rain, I walked into the village of Tambillo. My feet told me I had
walked long enough. My back and shoulders were sore. There was a petrol station, a concrete church, fruit stalls serving the passengers on the buses and trains, but no hostel. I caught a bus the short ride south to Machachi, a tiny market town, built astride the old main road but now by-passed by the Panamerican. When the American Ambassador, Hassaurek, came here, after a long, muddy trek from the coast, he seems to have reached the end of his tether.

Two long rows of miserable huts line both sides of the main road. These inns are detestable hovels, built of earth, thatched with dried grasses, and without windows and floorings. They are notorious for their filth and vermin. In one of them, I once passed a horrible night. I was literally lacerated by fleas. Cleanliness is unknown to the inhabitants. Their chief pleasure is aguardiente. It looks down on a beautiful valley, destined by nature to be a home of plenty and comfort, but converted by man into a haunt of sloth, filth, idleness, poverty, vice and ignorance.

Little had changed. I loved it.

I asked a local boy: ‘Is the Hotel Miraville still open?’

‘Dunno.’

It was strange to have to ask, as we were both leaning on it at the time, but you couldn’t tell. I kicked the door a while, then went elsewhere. The open-air market was huge; it needed to be to contain the produce. Plants grew large to cope with altitude; tomatoes reached the size of oranges, beetroots made cannonballs. Cabbages were carried one at a time, filling a man’s arms. At every corner, tripe, fish and sausages were thrown sizzling onto rice and spooned down the mouths of workers and shoppers. The only real bar was a two-room affair with a corridor that
cut down the middle and out to the back yard. At twenty past five in the afternoon the hardened drinkers were already in there. The concrete floor was painted red and scored to look like tiles; it was furnished from a skip. But there was a Rock-Ola jukebox full of old-fashioned Ecuadorian music: the ballads of Vicente Jarra and my own favourite, Julio Jaramillo – Nat King Cole, without the sugar. I put in some money. Julio Jaramillo’s light crooning voice filled the room. Customers nodded appreciatively. Two middle-aged men arrived at the next table. The barmaid looked at them very carefully. One had an
ill-repaired
harelip; he was quiet and wore a smart, grey, cable-stitch jersey. His friend was a burly, teak-coloured Indian, sunburned on the outside, and rum-cured on the inside. He had broad cheekbones, narrow eyes and greasy black hair swept back over his collar. A half litre of rum was 80 cents and they took two dollars’ worth to the table and drained a half litre before I finished my first beer. After a while, Harelip stood up and took steps towards me. His friend said, ‘Don’t bother him.’

But he advanced with one hand behind his back. When he was close, he whipped out the arm, offering me sweets from a bag. I took one, he bowed slightly, and returned to his seat. In five minutes he was back. He picked up my bottle, topped up my drink with great formality, kissed my hand and bowed again, before retiring. I put on more music and carried on making notes about the day, head well down. Within minutes, Harelip was standing, pointing at the dark Indian, trembling with rage, his arm shaking incoherent accusations at him. He stormed out. One drink later he was back. He marched straight up to the Indian, and before he could get up, raised something
high above his head in his right hand, and smashed it down over his head. I flung my arms protectively across my face as the room exploded in a cloud of coloured fragments. It seemed as if he had filled the room with Christmas tree lights. The floor made a noise like a snare drum. I lowered my arms to look: he had smashed his bag of sweets over the man’s head.

Next day I bussed back to Tambillo to pick up the trail. I bought oranges from the stalls and a pepino, a heavy, creamy-coloured fruit with purple spatters down it. I followed the railway line uphill. Lush copses alternated with smallholdings where the flourishing plants held each other in choking embraces. It was warm and humid; you could almost hear the chlorophyll prickling in the bud, the sap unfurling the tendril and starching the leaf.

The Royal Road led away from the railway down a narrow track, where brown piglets basked in the sunny hedgerow, unbelievably pleased with life. It was a
sub-tropical
version of an English country lane.
Sulphur-coloured
butterflies pittered past me and, in the ditches, the white sleeves of arum lilies were fertilised by torpid black flies. The path on the map was supposed to continue straight ahead but the path on the ground was having none of it, and took a sharp left turn down a hard cobbled road to the Panamerican. A tumbledown house stood where the cartographic and real paths parted, and a sign outside proclaimed the unlikely: ‘Señor Escobar, Lawyer.’ The shoeless old man who came out to calm his furious dogs peered at my map. ‘This is all wrong! There is no road going straight on. The Royal Road does not run anywhere near here.’ To summarise: there had never been any other road in the world except the one which took me
directly away from his property and down to the bus-stop on the Panamerican.

I snacked, lying in the hedge, mulling over the maps and the GPS. The oranges were full of pips, but the juice was deliciously sweet. The pepino looked beautiful but tasted like a bland melon. There was still no road to follow except the one to the Panamerican. I went down and continued south beneath the Mack trucks. After a mile on the tarmac, my feet began to burn. I walked on for two more hours, back into Machachi. For the last mile, I was walking on knives. I tried a new remedy for blisters; it began with the large rum I drank before I could face looking at them. One had begun to tear open. I was worried about infection but could not get antiseptic cream behind the skin and into the wound. I tipped a little of my rum in. There was a short stinging sensation and then, as it ran onto the raw skin, a huge shot of pain which seemed to electrify my whole body. I applied the rest of the rum in the more usual way, re-bandaged and went to find the jukebox bar.

I went to the spot where the bar had been the night before. It wasn’t there. Shutters prevented me looking inside. A pile of timber was stacked against the side of the passage, and breezeblocks had closed the doors to the
barrooms
. It echoed the chapter from
Don Quixote
where he arrives at an inn late at night, imagines it to be a castle and recasts the host and guests as characters in a tale of fantasy. Mayhem follows. In the morning, he groans to see how his demons have been tormenting him, for everything has changed, and is now cunningly disguised as an ordinary country inn.

I retreated next door to a café and ordered chicken and
chips. One drunk came in for a take-away, staggered blindly as far as the door, fell down headlong and went to sleep. The manager took his food and put it on the passenger seat of his pick-up, picked the man up by the shoulders and dumped him behind the wheel. Two minutes later the man woke up and drove off. Foreigners were so unusual here that all three waitresses came over to serve me, and one gave me her phone number.

‘The bar next door,’ I asked, ‘has it shut down because of the fight?’

‘There’s no bar in this street.’

Fiction stalks reality, subverting, drawing you in.

It took from 1908 to 1957 to construct Ecuador’s railways. It was an expression of ambition, confidence and the cheapness of human life. Hundreds died building them: mostly native Indians, black slave-descendants and immigrant Jamaicans. As roads have improved, that investment in money and blood has slipped into decay. Trains south from Quito now only run on weekends, ferrying day-trippers to Cotopaxi National Park. The rails lack the sheen of a line in regular use, and the sleepers support extravagant orange fungi.

I was following the railway to avoid the Panamerican, whose asphalt covers this section of the Royal Road. The day began warm, and walking the line was a mixed blessing. When I had to walk on the track itself, some sleepers were trimmed square beams while others were rough logs, set at irregular intervals, which stopped me
getting into any kind of stride. Bridges over the rivers were simply wooden frames holding up the line. Sometimes locals had put planks between the rails; if not I had to hop from sleeper to sleeper. As it was Sunday, and excursions were running, it would be handy to avoid being on a bridge when a train came. But there was only one line, so I wouldn’t get lost.

When the line ran through steep and very narrow cuts, the banks were thick with ferns and the air was sewn by the startled flights of giant southern thrushes. After a few hours, the track began to rise and wind, and I entered a deep airless cutting with only a couple of feet of space on either side of the track. Sweat prickled on my scalp. The only sound was birdsong. Then a different note caught my attention, and I hurried ahead and pressed myself into a niche in the earth wall of the embankment. A huge orange diesel locomotive roared round the bend and swept by inches from my face. Inside, the carriages were almost empty, just a few sedate local families with small children. But the roofs were covered with people, partying, waving, gone. Birdsong tinkled in my ears again, the engine’s clamour a memory.

The valley was narrowing, and the line turned left to make its way to a pass at 11,500 feet. I climbed a bank overlooking the ground I had walked, and ate lunch. Below me, in a small tributary valley, dark Spanish pines looked down on a verdurous flower meadow where blossoms of cream, white and yellow lolled in the long grass. The young seed heads caught the sunlight in silver beads, and black and white cows waded belly-deep through the dappled billows and glossy pools of herbage. I could hear the contented rip of their tongues through the luxuriance.
A short walk brought me out above the head of that valley onto bare moorland. The ground was undulating and the occasional purple pea flowers on tendrilled stems whispered of abandoned hopes to till this high bare land. Cloud clung to the ridge, and it grew cool and windy. I made the pass in the late afternoon, and called it a day, pitching my tent out of sight in a copse of Spanish pines.

Continuing next morning, I rolled down the
Pan-american
for five miles, then down the lanes into the Cutuchi Valley, where a stone bridge crossed a rowdy stream. Here, among the new eucalyptus plantations, were the headwaters of the Cutuchi River, which descended to the next town: Latacunga. I rested on the parapet. Behind me to the east, a bank of clouds hid the mountains. Then suddenly I saw, high in their folds, another land, an ice kingdom in the sky. The clouds closed. But, still higher, another rent opened in my ordinary world and revealed snowy slopes that looked like icing smoothed by a knife. I was glimpsing the flanks of Mount Cotopaxi, the world’s highest active volcano. The clouds broke again to reveal the lip of the crater, slightly dished, higher at the edges. It stood like a colossal barnacle, the feathers of cloud feeding in the thin cold air. In a moment, the curtain closed. I was alone on the empty road.

Lower down, plantations of mature eucalyptus overarched the lane in magnificent avenues, like the nave of a church. Eucalyptus and Spanish pines are the only trees now cultivated in any numbers in the mountains, and they are both introduced species. The eucalyptuses, or gum trees, are by far the most popular. No local tree performs like these Australian imports. Dr Nicolás Martínez, Governor of Tungurahua province, first planted
Eucalyptus globulus
in Ecuador in 1865. He found they could grow at great speed, attaining heights of fifty feet in six years. A section of that first tree now stands in Ambato Museum. It was said to have reached a height of two hundred and fifty feet, and a circumference of twenty-six feet. The trunk and limbs naturally grow straight and produce dense, strong wood. Where roadside lopping had taken place, smaller branches had been left, and I cut myself a long walking stick that came up to my chin.

In the hedgebanks were strange succulents whose narrow, spiked leaves curved upwards to form a sphere. The stems grew long and sinuously, and blackened when the plant died, looking disturbingly like burnt elephants’ trunks. Behind these armoured hedges were large farms growing cut flowers in huge polythene greenhouses. Millions of roses and gladioli, a native plant here, come out of this valley every month, mostly for the $60 million annual export trade.